Novolog works for me!

If you've been following my Adventures with Insulin you might have read about how I gave up trying to make Humalog work for me. No matter how I tried to use it, I'd see surprising highs and surprising lows. The more I took it the worse it got. I concluded it either wasn't matching up with my food properly or it was sparking the growth of antibodies which were blocking its effect for an hour or so.

What a nice surprise to discover that Novolog, in contrast, does exactly what it is advertised to do. It starts to work within 5 minutes of injection, peaks between 1 hour and 1.5 hours (when my food peaks) and is mostly gone by 3 hours.

This means I can now eat a a restaurant and NOT have to inject until I see the waitress bringing the food. No more chugging smarties while no food appears and I wonder if they'll ever sober up the cook enough to get out my dinner!

For example, last week I brought some along when I went to a new restaurant that had advertised Jamaican Patties, something I adore. If I was using R I would have had to inject almost an hour before eating and if I didn't eat the patty I'd have to come up with 15-20 grams of carbs fast.

With the Novolog, I was able to order my patty and take a look at what I got before injecting. After it was served I had grave doubts about whether I would want to eat it. One bite confirmed that the crust was disgusting. Since I had no insulin in me, I could just pick out the filling (all meat), throw away the crust, and not worry about having a couple units of insulin flying around my blood stream. Three cheers for Novolog!

Though the Novolog is perfect for eating out, I still prefer R insulin for those meals that I make myself where I know what to expect and can inject 45 minutes before the food comes out of the oven.

What I like about R insulin is that I don't usually eat big meals, I like to kind of nibble at this and that through the evening. R's slower pattern of absorption lets me browse my food over a couple hours rather than eat all at once.

The other thing I like about R insulin is that it is just slow enough that a dinnertime shot will get my blood sugar to a good place when I'm done with my evening nibbling. The way my blood sugar works, if it is good at night when I stop eating, it is good first thing in the morning, too. This is a characteristic of the kind of MODY diabetes I have. This means that if I use R insulin I don't have to fool with basal insulin.